Liberty Theater, Astoria

davis — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:43:55 +0000

We made another trip out to Astoria to play a concert at the newly renovated Liberty Theater. The band converged at Luke’s Mom’s house on Wednesday afternoon for several hours of photo shoots followed by some rehearsing and some dinner. The next day held more of the same. However, the real accomplishment of our time in Astoria, prior to our actual show, was finally confronting the looming disaster regarding Ian’s Deagan Electravibes. These vibes had never quite worked right since we got them before the Spring Decemberists tour, and at the Outside Lands Festival sound check, the electronics completely stopped working and we had to mic the bars themselves. We could not find any technicians willing to work on such an exotic instrument and with another tour looming, we were dreading the idea of trying to fit Ian’s non-electro vibes into the van with all of our other gear. The answer came when we needed it most: first we decided that with nothing to loose, we would take the instrument apart and try to fix it ourselves. We were able to get good results just by tinkering a bit (the same intermittent functionality as before the failure), but the real solution came with the bold idea to remove all of the built in electronics (this included a preamp, a reverb tank, a vibrato circuit, tone controls, a volume pot, and a power supply). All the bars themselves have electromagnetic pickups attached and these are all wired in series, so we just attached the output from the bars directly to an amplifier and found that the signal was perfectly clean and consistent. By bypassing the electronics module, we greatly simplified the instrument, thereby reducing the future likelihood of malfunction, as well as eliminating all grounding problems. The Electravibes stood up well at the show on Friday night and sounded the best they ever have. This was a huge victory of ingenuity for those of us in the band that care about such things. The Liberty Theater show went well too.

Denver

davis — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:31:27 +0000

in denver

The new set of electro-vibes that Luke had acquired from Astoria High School for Ian to play on the road had a lot of problems in Missoula. All of the electronics and pots were filthy and this was causing so much distortion that the sound crew had to use overheads for the vibes. We hustled to Denver and to a Guitar Center so that we could buy some De-Oxit spray to clean out the wiring, replace Ryan’s lost kick pedal, and pick up some other miscellaneous stuff. Having no other opportunity before load in, we took the vibes apart in the parking lot of the Guitar Center. Ian had taken the bars off too, thinking that the generally dirty state of the instrument could be contributing to its noise, and I had the circuit boards out on the pavement. The other Guitar Center patrons were quite baffled by our spectacle. Having put the vibes back together, we hauled them inside and hooked them up to an amp and they worked great. No one who worked there really seemed to care about any of this, which was very odd.

The Fillmore in Denver is a gorgeous old room that had been a car assembly plant in the 1920s, then a roller rink, then abandoned, and finally a concert hall. With a capacity of 3000, it is one of the biggest venues of the tour. The Decemberists hadn’t sold it out, so when we played there was some room in the back of the floor. However, the crowd was very receptive for our set and treated us like headliners with their responses to each song. After we played, we piled in the van and tried to get some of the long drive to Kansas City out of the way. Everyone being quite tired, we only made it to the Colorado border before getting a hotel room. With seven people, we have to be kind of sneaky with the hotel rooms- so far we haven’t gotten caught.

the sound of davis » deagan electravibes

Liberty Theater, Astoria

Denver